Can't have one without the other--updated version

Luke 2:1-20
Tonight we’re going to merge the two major Christian holidays—Christmas and Easter. We’re talking about Christmas for obvious reasons…namely, it’s tomorrow! And we’re going to talk about Easter, namely Good Friday, because I don’t think we can really truly understand Christmas if we don’t also take into account Easter. While they are separate and distinct and about two seemingly different things—Christmas that of life, joy, and peace, and Good Friday that of death, sacrifice, and suffering, they are linked by the fact that they are both consequences of God’s saving work—God’s act of redemption and salvation.
Now, to be quite honest, I’m a Christmas person. I’ve always enjoyed the food, the family gatherings, the lights, the colors, and, of course, the presents. When I headed off to seminary, I got to plunge into Christmas in a deeper and more significant way. I mean, when you go to theology school you can’t simply talk about gifts and Christmas trees, you have to really look at Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the incarnation, God’s presence with us. The theological stuff. And I ended up loving that. I was so awed by the fact that God not only came to reconcile and save humanity from our own sins and brokenness but God came in the most fragile form possible—a baby. God didn’t come in like Superman, or Batman, or Spiderman. God wasn’t some rock solid hulky super hero. God came into this world dependent on other humans to care for, attend to, teach, and love God. That’s sort of bizarre in my mind. Think about it. God, the all powerful, the creator of the universe could have come in with the strength of the terminator, but instead came in with the fragility of a newborn baby.

So this Christmas business, even theologically, is sweet, endearing, and humble. But then, a few months later, you get Easter. Now, Easter too can be seen as sweet and endearing…pastel colors, the Easter bunny, lilies, and the Hallelujah chorus. But when you do the theological digging, or simply really examine Easter, you have to take a long hard look at Jesus on the cross and what it means for God to have bled that day at Calvary. Good Friday doesn’t seem all that good. We hung Christ from a cross and waited for him to die. Crucifixion was one of the worst forms of execution known to the Romans, it’s slow, it’s painful, it’s exhausting…and that’s what we did to God. Quite frankly Easter, and more specifically Good Friday, became undesirable to me. That didn’t even take into account my concern at the notion of Father God sacrificing his Son. Yeah, Easter wasn’t really jiving with my notions of a loving and compassionate God. I longed for the goodness of God. I longed for compassion, justice, peace, hope…and somehow blood and sacrifice didn’t pan out to God’s goodness. So, in some ways, I let Good Friday fall into the shadows and I started focusing more and more on the beauty, the awe, and the wonder of Christmas.
I focused on the mystery and incredible nature of the incarnation and avoided the pain, sacrifice, and blood of the cross. But recently I had an experience that started to shift my focus.

I’m part of a team charged with creating the first service of worship at the upcoming Annual Conference. We are a group of young adult pastors. We are responsible for the music, the design, the liturgy, everything, except the preaching, which is left to the bishop. Last week I was thinking about the service and thought it would be great to use the paintings of an artist I had seen. The artist creates paintings of Jesus during the worship service. He had been at a youth conference last year and did a few paintings. They are big and colorful. And they are of Christ. They aren’t normal colors you’d use for a person; they’re yellow, green, red, and purple. They are vibrant and impressive. I had seen them in some pictures a friend took and thought they’d be perfect for the upcoming service.

So, I mentioned the paintings to a couple of pastor friends and I asked them if they knew where I might find the paintings. Both knew and both immediately responded, “but they’re really bloody, and some people will complain.” They’re words struck me as odd. I said, “Maybe I’m wrong here, but I could have sworn that the blood of the cross was sort of important for our faith.” Even in my Easter/Good Friday avoidance, I knew that the blood of the cross was essential. Neither responded. I don’t think they themselves would object, but they expected others would. I couldn’t get their cautions out of my head. I mean, how is it possible that we, as Christians, as an annual conference, can object to the blood of Christ? I know that it is shocking. The idea of sacrificing one’s son is scandalous. I know we don’t want to admit to crucifying God on a cross. I get that. I told my friends they could send the folks with complaints to me. I mean, it wasn’t me acting as God who invented these ideas. It wasn’t I who sent my son. It wasn’t I who decided to die for the sins of all. It wasn’t I who understood that God would have to die in order for us to realize the love and grace God wants to give us. It wasn’t me. It was God. So then, how can I object? God invented the idea. God sent God’s son. God decided to die for the sins of all. God understood it would take God’s own death for us to realize the love and grace God has for us. It was God. And so if you or I complain, we’re not simply fussing at each other, we’re fussing at God. And maybe I don’t like how it came out. Maybe we don’t like the blood of the cross. Maybe we don’t like that it was our sins that killed Jesus. As a matter of fact, we probably don’t like it and want to object. But this is our story. This is God’s story for us. This is our gospel. This is our God.

Even preparing this sermon, I was struck by the intensity of blood, sacrifice, and pain. I worried that it might be overwhelming or spoil the Christmas cheer for each of you. And as Bob worked on the power point and selected these pictures, he too was worried about the blood. He told me on Sunday, “You know, I looked at a lot of pictures of Jesus on the cross and some of them are pretty gory, so I tried not to get one of those. I didn’t want to scare the kids.” But despite my hesitations, the blood is the thrust of the message. If we don’t want to even depict the blood that Jesus shed because of guilt, or sadness, or because we don’t like it, then we need to examine our faith. Because part of what is the most central to our faith is the blood of Christ. And if we are going to reject the blood, then we are also rejecting the salvation that comes from that same blood.

My guess is we’re on the same page and we like the idea of salvation. We like forgiveness. We like to be saved. We like the power of leaving our sins and our past and our weaknesses in the past. We like the opportunity to start fresh and not be forever guilty for the wrongs we have committed. With salvation we feel good. With salvation we experience grace, peace, and mercy. And we like it! Salvation pulls us away from pain, affliction, and grief. Salvation fills us with the goodness of the kingdom and we want to rejoice in it. Salvation is good, it’s enjoyable. And then in the midst of our enjoyment, someone throws the blood of Christ in our face. A lot of blood. Blood that covers the body of Jesus. The Jesus who offers us so much good is now covered in blood. And we don’t like it. It’s shocking. We shouldn’t see blood together with peace. We shouldnt’ see blood coupled with justice. We shouldn’t see blood together with mercy or compassion. Above all, we shouldn’t see blood on God. They’re incompatible. They simply don’t go together.

But through the history that God created, they do go together. If we don’t’ have the blood, then we don’t have redemption. Without the blood we have no salvation. We need the blood of Christ. We depend on it. We can’t have one without the other; we can’t have the good without the bad. Redemption requires blood. That which appeals to us requires that which does not.

Let me back-track a minute. For me, Christmas highlighted the beauty, the mystery, the wonder of God’s relationship with us through Jesus Christ. And Easter highlighted the sacrifice, the pain, the burdens Christ bore on my behalf. And quite frankly, Easter made me uncomfortable. I want to focus on the sweet baby Jesus lying in a manger, not a whipped and stripped Jesus hanging from the cross. But the crazy thing is, when we say Jesus Christ, we mean both/and. We mean both the holy child lying in a manger in Bethlehem, and a bruised and battered man dying on a cross. We can’t just look at the Christ child and pretend the rest didn’t happen. If we say Jesus we have to think of his life as a whole—beginning to end, infant lying in a lowly manger…teacher…prophet…healer…Messiah…Crucified…and then resurrected. Jesus Christ is all of those things and we can only truly appreciate Christmas in the fullness of its mystery and wonder if we also try and understand Easter in the fullness of its mystery and wonder. You can’t have one without the other.

Let me try this from another angle, I imagine we like the food we eat. We like hamburgers, or chicken noodle soup, or pork tamales. They satisfy us and we like the taste. It’s good and we like it. And yet in the midst of the goodness, we don’t want to confront the blood of the butcher block. We don’t want to know the fullness of reality. We don’t really want to acknowledge that what we are eating had to die first. We don’t want to accept that for us to enjoy something, a sacrifice was made first.

I would say it happens the same way with Christ, with the blood and the sacrifice. We want to enjoy salvation, but we don’t want to see the blood. We want to participate in the holy banquet, but we don’t’ want to know it was the holy child who suffered so we could be there. We want to separate the two. We want to put the suffering and the blood on one side and salvation and joy on the other.

Some of you may be ready to say, “Pastor stop talking about blood and sacrifice, wounds and brokenness. It’s Christmas Eve, we’re waiting for the holy child, how can you talk about these things? We should talk about parties, hope, and goodness. Don’t talk about blood. Don’t talk about such harsh things. It’s hard to think about that. It’s uncomfortable. Talk about peace. Talk about hope. Talk about joy.” I’d say, throughout Advent we have been talking about those things, but we must also talk about the blood, because if we can’t accept the blood of Christ on the cross, then we also cannot accept the incarnation of Christmas. They’re tied together—the blood and the incarnation. We need them both. If God had not been born as a baby, we wouldn’t fully understand what happened on the cross. We wouldn’t understand God’s humility in coming as a fragile baby so that we could care for him. We wouldn’t appreciate the mystery of the incarnation. And if we didn’t have Christmas, if we didn’t see God in the person of Jesus from the beginning, then the cross would not mean as much to us. For if Jesus is not Immanuel, God with us, God incarnate, then it wasn’t God who died on the cross and it wasn’t God who died for our sins and who offers us forgiveness.

In other words, the salvation we experience, the hope we maintain, they both require the incarnation AND the blood of the cross and we can’t have one without the other.

Christmas is absolutely about celebration. We celebrate God’s coming into this world. We celebrate that God loves us so much that God sent his only begotten son to be with us, to live with us, to save us. At Christmas we celebrate. But we aren’t just celebrating the birth of a baby, we are celebrating the birth of a Savior. THE Savior. Jesus Christ. We celebrate not just a fragile infant entrusted to our care, but also the boy who would grow into the man who would save the world from sin and death. Christmas is joyous, but it’s even more of a celebration when we look back through the lens of history and see both God incarnate and God crucified and God resurrected. So the blood of the cross may be gory. It may make us cringe or shirk back in pain or embarrassment, but ultimately it shows us the depth of God’s love, which was first made known on a starry night in Bethlehem. And the depth and width and height of God’s love is DEFINTELY worth celebrating. So tonight let’s make our voices loud and our praises louder as we celebrating not just the birth of a child, but the birth of THE child, the Christ child, the holy one who came to save. Let’s celebrate that we don’t have one without the other!